One of the advancements in computerization of graphic design has been the introduction of electronic design templates. Electronic design templates are pre-defined visual designs in electronic format that may serve as the starting point for creating a personalized or customized visual design. Electronic design templates typically include pre-populated content, such as sample text, images, layout and color scheme, that may be edited by a user of a computerized electronic visual design tool to create a customized design. Electronic design templates greatly ease the barriers to creation of visual designs by graphic professionals and laypersons alike. A typical electronic visual design tool will allow a user to view available templates, select one for editing, and then edit the template by entering text information, moving, removing, adding, and/or changing existing design elements in the template, changing colors, fonts, backgrounds, images, text, etc.
In a visual design creation environment, the number of available visual design templates available for use with an electronic visual design tool may be quite large. A given electronic visual design tool may provide hundreds or even thousands of available visual design templates. The limited screen size of an electronic device prevents simultaneous display of all available templates. A user of such tool may thus find it challenging to parse through and find template(s) that they might choose. To assist in overcoming this challenge, many electronic visual design tools provide a template search and selection tool which displays available templates in a gallery view on the screen of the user's electronic display. The template search and selection tool may include filtering tools to allow the user to filter the template search results to view only those templates that meet the filter criteria. To further assist in template selection, the electronic visual design tool may display the available templates in a gallery view containing multiple simultaneously displayed small-scale images of available templates from which to choose. Such images are typically low-resolution non-editable raster images (sometimes called “thumbnail” images) of generic, non-personalized and unedited templates and take up only a small area of the available screen area. The gallery view of images of available templates allows for side-by-side comparison of different template images to facilitate more efficient template selection. However, despite having search, filter and gallery view tools, a user of an electronic visual design tool may still encounter difficulty in choosing a template if they cannot envision how such templates will look if edited to include their own personalized style and content modifications.